Sunday, 22 February 2015

Ok, this is supposed to be a ‘DC’ diary and I don’t live in DC anymore
but… as I’d like to start keeping track of my cultural encounters again, this
seems as good a place as any to put them. It’s been a year and half since I
returned from Washington and during that time there have been a few interesting
trips to the theatre, of which these five are the most memorable as I’m sitting
here at this moment…

1)Mozart’s Magic
Flute at the Curve Theatre, Leicester. April 2014. This performance was put
on by the English Touring Opera company. I would guess that some of the people
who like and understand opera look down a little at the really popular examples
of the genre: Carmen springs to mind,
and the Magic Flute is also in that
category – so popular that a real aficionado can’t really demonstrate their
superiority by praising it. To make matters worse, this version of the Magic Flute has been translated into
English, which probably makes it about as déclassé as Cats. Still, being an operatic dunderhead, I loved it. My experience
of opera largely consists in watching the film Amadeus, but this was a much jollier affair. The Queen of the
Night’s aria, so manifestly the handiwork of a composer with swagger, was
simply mind blowing; and the song of the bird catcher and his new missus is a
delight. Sitting on the front row and getting to look straight down and
close-up on the orchestra doing their stuff was fun too. Philosophically, I
found the enlightenment mumbo jumbo a little hard to swallow, and ended up
rooting for the dark powers of reaction and superstition by the finale (but
what’s new?)

2)Antony and
Cleopatra at the Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. November 2013.
Cleopatra would be one of history’s great characters even if Shakespeare had
never mentioned her. Seducing Caesar, ruling half the Roman Empire with Mark
Antony and frolicking away madly in oriental luxury while Octavian plotted
against her. And then her final epic victory, defeating defeat by serpentine
suicide. But with Shakespeare’s assistance, she has left the other feminine
enemies of Rome (Boudicca, Zenobia) in her wake to became the ultimate icon of
feminine power and mystery, even achieving that acme of honours: her own Lego mini-figure:

So the performance of Cleopatra should decide
the success of the production. In this case, it didn’t. Joaquina Kalukango as Cleopatra
was not the force of nature the role calls for but, somehow, the play managed
to be a winner anyway. Perhaps it was Jonathan Cake as a particularly hunky and
sculpted Antony, or the stand out performance of Chukwudi Iwuji as Enobarbus,
or perhaps it was the experience of seeing such an epic play in such an
intimate theatre, but the result was a triumph all the same.

3) The Two
Gentlemen of Verona at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon.
August 2014. The BBC made the effort to produce television versions of
Shakespeare canon in the late 1970s. The budget can’t have been great and some
of them fell a little flat, The Two
Gentlemen of Verona included. This version at the RST didn’t have a
particularly famous cast and walking into the theatre to see the stage set up
like an Italian piazza, complete with café and gelateria, set a few alarums
ringing. I needn’t have worried. The audience interaction was fun (although being
introduced to Julia as Silvia’s boyfriend was initially a little
discombobulating), the acting was great and some of the scenes were weirdly
hypnotic (the nightclub dancing scene was a little like Twin Peaks set in Milan). But one role makes or breaks the Two Gents: Crab the Dog. In this case,
an up and coming actor by the name of Mossup was a revelatory force of comic genius.

4)

Much Ado
About Nothing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon.
October 2014. Ok, ok, I should probably stop watching this. In Washington alone
we had this and this. But it’s just so gosh darn enjoyable. In this
case, the result was a little disappointing. The first intimation of trouble
was renaming it Love’s Labours Won
and arguing in the programme that Much
Ado is really an alternative name for one of Shakespeare’s plays considered
lost, the sequel to Love’s Labours Lost
(except with, er, a completely different group of characters and plot). The
slapstick didn’t quite hit the right notes (although the rest of the audience
sounded their appreciation) and the setting (England immediately after World
War I) wasn’t remotely compatible with the warmth of the dialogue. Setting it
in Italy (the Kenneth Branagh film), California (the Joss Whedon film) or
somewhere latino (the version in DC) reflects both the characters’ names, the
summery feel and the pure joy we feel in rooting for Shakespeare’s most
likeable couple. The sombre shroud cast over proceedings by the horror of the
Great War, not helped by the wintry stage décor, took something special away
from what might otherwise have been an excellent production. Later in the play,
time seemed to skip forward a few years and we had the flappers of the roaring
twenties, which suited the play much better. Michelle Terry was brilliant as
Beatrice, although Dogberry was played as somebody with genuine mental health
issues, which again undercut the humour, and Benedick (Edward Bennett) was so
camp that an entirely new dimension was added to the play (intentionally or
not). Imagine, if you will, a Benedick played by this guy’s double.
Beatrice at one stage dressed up in a suit a tie which on its own might not suggest much but, with Benedict's Matthew Kelly impression, it did raise an interesting question… did Benedick and Beatrice
want to remain single because they were gay, and was their eventual union then
a lavender marriage?

As an aside, why did we change
enigmatical to enigmatic and politic to political?

5) Antigone at
the Lakeside Theatre, Nottingham.October
2014. This adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy stuck closely to the plot whilst
setting it today in gritty urban interiors. Classics is a rich, white person’s
thing, populated by progressives who genuinely want it to be less white and
rich, so I suspect this version got good reviews from lots of people who felt a
lot of right on condescension towards it. Unfortunately, for me it was memorable
only in the way that the things we really want to forget are the things we
can’t forget. Putting ancient works in new settings can work fantastically
well, for example the film O Brother, Where
Art Thou?, and Antigone itself has been cleverly adapted, or perhaps used,
since it became almost unrecognizable, in the anti-apartheid play, The Island. This is not one of those
times. It is not even a brave crack at one of those times. It is New Jack City minus the charisma crossed
with Eastenders minus the humour. No.
Just, no.

Anyway, with this brief round-up out of the way, next up will be a more in-depth review of Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holidayat the Swan Theatre in Stratford.